Coming of Age Day, Ainu tapestries, and a Bread Machine accident

I found these buried cars by the international student housing.  Most people here will put up the wiper blades to keep them from freezing to the windshield.

This car looks like it hasn't moved all winter.  I can just see the wiper blades sticking out of the snow.

The bicycles are buried from the snowfall.

Here is the winding path through the snow leading to one of the omnipresent vending machines.

Bre and I went by one of the government centers that are celebrating a coming of age ceremony.  This is a holiday unique to Japan.  What little I know about I learned from this blog at Wikipedia and this English blog.  According to Wikipedia:

Coming of age ceremonies (成人式 Seijin-shiki) marks of one's coming of age (age of majority), which reflects both the expanded rights but also increased responsibilities expected of new adults. The ceremonies are generally held in the morning at local city offices throughout Japan.

I took this photo from outside the North Sapporo prefecture ceremony.  There were many young women in Kimonos and young men dressed in business suits.  I did see one young man who was dressed in a traditional kimono for men.

We walked on down by Odori Park and checked on the preparations for the Sapporo snow festival.  We found these trucks full of fresh/clean snow for use as building material.

Here is another photo of the Munich maypole.  According to the Sapporo Tourist Association:

Odori's maibaum was erected in 1976 at Nishi 11-chome as a present from Sapporo's friendship town, Munich.
Maibaum means "May tree" in German, and it is a symbolic tree of Maifest (May Festival). The 23-m-high pole is decorated with items expressing the flag, customs and events of Munich, and a circle of fir trees are set atop the tree.

This is one of the sites of the snow sculptures.  In this photo you can see the bucket brigade they used to move the panels that they put at the edge of the snow sculpture.  The guys at the bottom would pass up one sheet at a time to the guys on the scaffolding.  I couldn't see what they did with the panels after that.

Here is another view of a different part of the scaffolding.

This is not the best photo, but it gives you a good sense of how they use the excavator machines to move the snow up.  The one machine is higher than the other.  They use a bucket brigade system with the excavator machines to move the snow up from where it gets dumped on the ground to the top back corner of the snow sculpture.  This snow sculpture looked like it would be 40 feet or 12 meters in height.

This snow sculpture seemed to be being build by the Japanese Defense Force.

The JDF was also using their own trucks to bring in the snow.  Here is a photo of one of their trucks.

Bre and I stopped by the famous Sapporo Clock Tower.  This Clock Tower is very popular with the Japanese, so I thought I had to get a photo of Bre in front of it.

Bre and I went through the underground passageway from Odori Park to Sapporo Train Station.  Along the way we saw these traditional Ainu tapestries.  I liked the patterns.  Bre liked the symmetrical stitching.

We found a large snow pile on campus by the Clark Theater and I liked getting the photo of Bre by it for scale.

Here is a view across the fields near sunset.  The footpath has become so narrow that only one person at a time can use it.

Here we have Bre's bread machine accident.  Bre made a loaf that is too large for the machine.  At first glance through the glass panel that we had a sticky mess on our hands.

The part in the middle didn't turn brown because it was pressed against the glass, but it actually did cook through.

That's all for now,

-Kyle (and Bre)